Posts Tagged ‘troika’

EVE developer CCP’s World of Darkness MMO might be naught but fang and ash, but Vampire will never truly die. Not so long as Vampire: The Masquerade: Bloodlines (and, you know, a massively successful White Wolf role-playing setting) is still alive and kicking. But wait, that can’t be right. Vampire: The Masquerade: Bloodlines developer Troika keeled over way back in 2005. Any other game would be buried and forgotten by now, but Bloodlines’ community – presumably made up of real immortal vampires, as that would explain how they have so much time (read: all of it, ever) for this – forges on. So here we are in the year two-thousand-and-four-of-the-teens, and there is a brand new Vampire patch. I know. I know.

Good, in fact excellent, tidings for those who find themselves able to enjoy Fallouts both old and new, and for anyone who lived through the 90s heyday of PC RPGs. Tim Cain, the main brain behind the original Fallout and later co-founder of the much-missed Troika, has fetched up at Obsidian. Until this July, he was at Carbine, working since 2005 on what turned out to be Wildstar, but today we discover that he’s now Senior Programmer at the Fallout: New Vegas/ KOTOR 2 devs. AVENGERS ASSEMBLE.Read the rest of this entry »

I’m guessing all these patches are iterative and not of much interest to the rmore casual Vampire The Masquerade: Bloodlines observer by now, but whenever one of these fan-made updates passes by my inbox I still can’t help but double-take and think ‘wow.’ You guys are wonderful. Completely mad, but wonderful. Bloodlines is now seven years old, was essentially abandoned by its publisher after its developer closed a few months after release, but the fans have just kept on going, fixing things, improving things, digging up locked away extra content and generally trying to keep their dream game alive. And, in a vampire fetishistic subset’s case, entirely gratuitously add oodles of bare breasts wherever possible and regardless of any effect on atmosphere or internal logic. I’ll stick to the fixes and restored content, thanks.

Anyway: patch 7.6 – 7.6! – is now out, and along with a few fixes restores some missing soundtrack music to the game. Grab it from here, along with assorted add-ons. If only every abandoned game received so much love so much later.

A while back I posted about the tragedy of games like Vampire: The Masquerade – Bloodlines. Following that one of the original Troika team, writer Brian Mitsoda, got in touch to talk about the project. A veteran of Troika and RPG-devs Obsidian, he’s had plenty of experience in the words that make up videogames. What follows is a discussion of Bloodlines, Troika, dialogue, character design, and inaccurate porn geographies.Read the rest of this entry »

There’s a bittersweet flavour to playing Bloodlines. It’s not because of the vampiric moodiness and the twilight tales that it tells, nor the real-world tragedy of its costly development finally undoing brave development studio, Troika. No, the sense of sorrow comes from the realisation that there’s nothing like this on the horizon. The idea is begged: why should there be so few games like this? Oh right, because it’s so very hard to do.Read the rest of this entry »